Hazards of Machine Translation: Eat at the Server Error (yum!)

Apparently there has been some hasty Babel Fish translation going on in China in preparation for the Olympics. The Chinese characters pictured mean "restaurant". The sign looks rather expensive! :-)

(from
Geekologie) Having worked in the localization business its hard for me to fathom printing and posting an expensive sign based on machine translation, but I see it happen all the time both for English in Japan and Japanese in Hawaii. In Japan I once worked for a company that had a large professionally printed sign warning "Use not the door lest the portal consume you." I felt like a druid had just cursed me every time I walked by that area. Mika recently noticed a (American) surfer with a very impressive looking kanji tattoo that simply read "foot":

The moral to the story is: Use a professional translator for signs and tattoos, or at least ask a native speaking friend. If you live in Hawaii and don't have any Chinese or Japanese speaking friends then you need to get out more. :-)
Pat, thank you for sending us this link.

Kevin just sent along this gem. It explains how a hanzi (Chinese character) with only three strokes and many meanings, one of which is "copulate", has lead to quite a few amusing signs in the country. Apparently a popular translation software package defaults to "fuck" as the meaning for this common character. I also received a link to the opposite of Engrish.com, Hanzi Smatter - dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in western culture. Observe: A very impressive looking tattoo reading "Power Piglet!"

Yes. Dan shows me postings on Engrish.com often >:-/. They are very funny, but it goes both ways!

I admit I laughed pretty hard at "Having Fun Prohibited", "Please don't accept stranglers invitation" and "Don't come to my bangolow house, understand, O.K. I hate all of you." I wonder if the last one sounded better in Malay.